Chazen Article

In April, Columbia Business School's Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, Social Enterprise Program and International Development Club co-sponsored an event featuring Paul Romer, senior fellow for the Stanford Center for International Development and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Dr. Romer has done foundational work on economic growth and outlines his current initiative, Charter Cities, which entails a new mechanism - said to lie somewhere on the fine line between revolutionary and crazy - to improve lives in the developing world.

Paul Romer believes that a critical lesson of today's world is that it is not enough to have a set of rules that work now, but there must be a dynamic that lets the rule of law change over time in response to the circumstances. Those in the Western world would argue that the appropriate model for rule of law is democracy: Voting empowers us to change the rules of the game. Dr. Romer, however, argued that other mechanisms have proven successful in adapting the law to changing circumstances. An important historical example is King Charles II's use of the charter in 17th-century England.

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